Pages

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 3,048 other followers

Two Thirds Water

THE BOOK: Two Thirds Water

PUBLISHED IN: 2018

THE AUTHOR: Rodger LeGrand.

THE PUBLISHER: Flutter Press.

SUMMARY: Two Thirds Water extends naturally from LeGrand’s previous collection, Seeds. Without water, a seed can’t grow. Transitions are often difficult. The growing in this collection is revealed through inverse relationships. These poems imagine the “Sea Without Water”, setting aside unfulfilled dreams in “Sleepwalking”, and the negation of self in “Spilled Moon”. Seeds is a collection about embarking upon transitions. This collection, Two Thirds Water, is about how we try to find our way while in transition.

THE BACK STORY: “Two Thirds Water was written to link with Seeds. I’m working toward building this sequence out into a triptych. It is difficult to say how long it took to write these poems. They were started last year when I was still living in Philadelphia before moving to Boston. I think about chapbooks as being quick glimpses of insight. Layering a sequence of chapbooks, from Seeds to Two Thirds Water, and the on to the third book in the sequence, is a lot of fun. It gives me room to play around with the chapbook genre. I hope that’s what you’ll find in these two collections. I want them to work as a models of the genre while connecting naturally to form a larger perspective on the themes in both collections.”

WHY THIS TITLE?: The title, Two Thirds Water, establishes a series of parallels—the planet and body are two thirds water, and water in various phases appears in two thirds of this collection.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? People might be interested in Two Thirds Water if they are interested in poetry that pays attention to itself. I think about poems as being made things.

REVIEW COMMENTS: “Poetry fans will sink happily into this exquisite new collection by Rodger LeGrand, where sleepwalking lovers wake alone, where desolate parrots pluck out their feathers, and where water continues to poison a community. But here too, snowflakes and memories in the lovely quiet hours have their own distinct shape, basic math demonstrates how—despite our presumed busy-ness—the universe goes on with or without us, and “moonlight spills through the blinds like milk.” Each word is deliciously chosen; each poem, a glorious triumph.”

~Robin Stratton, Editor-in-Chief, Boston Literary Magazine

“Many of the 16 poems in Rodger LeGrand’s latest collection, Two Thirds Water, are like sweet liquid disguising bitter medicine—until the aftertaste kicks in. As he picks his way along the narrow and treacherous boundary separating acceptance from surrender, LeGrand adds rich imagery and clever metaphor to that currently popular disclaimer, “It is what it is.” Put another way, his work grafts the Oriental philosophy that informs his world view onto the rock-bed American sensibility of his origins. For all its beauty, however, the world that LeGrand views is often unkind. In “Baby Elephant,” he begins with the practice of securing a chain around a baby elephant’s leg, there to remain even as the flesh grows around it. Like that elephant, he writes, human beings often grow up with ‘the sense of being trapped inside, chained to memories. That is how we live.’ Some of his one-liners go right to the bone. ‘One person always loves the other more. Love is not equal.’ ‘Age makes its move every day, in a race we’ve been losing from go.’ And, in ‘DIY’, he describes a man carving his own tombstone: ‘Hard work, but some things are better done yourself.’”

AUTHOR PROFILE: I teach writing at MIT, and I have started giving readings in the Boston area. When I’m not teaching or reading poetry I’m studying Moy Yat Ving Tsun Kung Fu. I started teaching Ving Tsun Kung Fu in Massachusetts this year. If anyone is interested in chatting about Kung Fu philosophy and the arts, please send me an email.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: There is another layer to these chapbooks which is not clearly stated in any of the poems at this point. I study and teach Ving Tsun (pronounced Wing Chun) Kung Fu. The forms—Siu Nim Tau, Chum Kiu, and Biu Jee—are physical, and in this context they also act as metaphorical guides for how I am thinking about layering this triptych. I used my interpretation of this sequence of open-hand forms as a way of planning for this trilogy of chapbooks. To be clear, these are not Kung Fu poems or poems about Kung Fu philosophy. Rather, in terms of modeling out the sequence of poems, I’m more focused on the structural progression of the forms and what they teach us than I am focused on writing about the content of the forms or interpretations of Kung Fu philosophy, at least so far.

The follow up to Two Thirds Water that will mirror Biu Jee, a recovery form that trains the hands to return to centerline whenever you find yourself in an unfavorable position. In the Moy Yat Ving Tsun Kung Fu system, we refer to Biu Jee as the standard compass so that our hands always return back to center, the way a compass always points north. Grandmaster Moy Yat was a painter and calligrapher, and I hope he would be happy to hear that I’m exploring ways to bring these two arts—one of the body and movement, the other of the body and language—together.